“Wow,” David said. “Look at you, Shannon.”

I didn’t know what to say or do; we had never greeted each other socially before. But it was Easter and I was excited to be there, so I leaned in and kissed the side of his mouth. He looked shocked for a second, then he blushed and took the tulips.

Even at seventeen, Dabney was a magnificent cook. She had made hot cheese puffs and a crab dip to start, then at the table we had beef tenderloin with a horseradish crust and creamed spinach and roasted potatoes. Dabney and Agnes Bernadette were drinking water, but David and I shared a bottle of red wine. The wine had been Dabney’s idea; she brought it up from the basement, a good bottle that a grateful citizen had given David, and which he’d been saving for a special occasion.

“This is a special occasion, right?” Dabney said. “It’s Easter and Shannon is here.”

“Our Savior reigns,” Agnes Bernadette warbled.

The meal was delicious and conversation eased a bit with the wine. David and I fell into reminiscing about the more memorable 911 calls we’d received over the years: the woman who claimed her husband made her drink Windex, the portly father who got stuck in the chimney on Christmas Eve in his Santa suit. Dabney listened and asked encouraging questions while Agnes Bernadette inserted non sequiturs.

Dessert was lemon meringue pie, made entirely from scratch, and then Dabney presented me with a small Easter basket filled with buttercream eggs and jelly beans. It was one of the nicest Easters I could remember.

Dabney stood up from the table. “I’m going to take Grammie home, and then I’m going over to Clendenin’s. I’ll be home at ten.”

David nodded his assent, although I knew, because he had confided in me, that he didn’t like Clendenin Hughes. David felt there was something not trustworthy about the kid, he was smug, and too smart for his own good.

I laid my crumpled napkin on the table. “I should go,” I said.

“No!” Dabney said. “Stay! Please stay!”

I looked at David. “Stay,” he said. “We can watch The Wizard of Oz.”

David and I started dating shortly thereafter. We kept it under wraps for the most part, appearing out in public only as “friends,” but I don’t think we were fooling anybody. Agnes Bernadette died in January, and David proposed to me the following Easter Sunday, in front of Dabney, over the dinner she had once again prepared.

Dabney said, “You two are a perfect match. I can see it.”

But the fact of the matter was, David couldn’t actually marry me because he was still married to Patty Benson. He had never hunted her down and asked for a divorce. It was when he finally used the information that he had gotten from the private investigator to track Patty down in Texas that he learned she had overdosed on Valium the year before. She was dead.

David had been afraid to tell Dabney. He believed that Dabney had spent her whole life waiting for her mother to come back. Dabney had been in therapy for years, dealing with her fear of leaving the island, which both David and Dabney’s therapist, Dr. Donegal, believed was connected to her abandonment. But Dabney took the news in stride.

“Oh,” she said. She shrugged. “Maybe I should feel sad? But I hardly remember her.”

Dabney was not so levelheaded in her relationship with Clendenin. The romance endured, despite the fact that she was at Harvard and Clen at Yale. There was the disastrous weekend of the Yale-Harvard game in New Haven during Dabney’s sophomore year. Both David and I thought that would be the end, but Dabney refused to let go.

And then, Dabney found herself unexpectedly pregnant at twenty-two. Clen was already in Bangkok; he sent her a plane ticket, but Dabney refused to leave the island. She would raise the baby herself, she said.

There was one time during the pregnancy when David was working a double and I heard Dabney crying in her room. I knocked lightly and opened the door. Dabney raised her face from the pillow and said, “I hate love, Shannon! Love is the worst thing in the world!”

I sat with her awhile and rubbed her back. I almost felt like a mother. I asked her if she missed Clendenin and she said yes, she missed him with every cell of her being. I asked her if she was angry at Clen for not coming back to Nantucket. She told me that she had asked him to please let her be. Not to call her or write to her or contact her in any way ever again. This was news to me, and I was pretty sure it would be news to David.

Dabney said, “His dream is over there. I couldn’t ask him to stay on Nantucket, Shannon. He would hate me and hate this baby…just the way…” She trailed off.

Gently, I said, “Just the way, what, Dabney?”

“Just the way my mother did,” she said.

“Your mother didn’t hate you,” I said. But with those words, I was way out of my comfort zone. Who was I to explain why Patty Benson had done what she’d done?

Dabney started crying again. “I thought Clen and I were a perfect match. I have been right about everyone else. Why was I wrong about myself? It isn’t fair!”

I agreed. It wasn’t fair.

David died of a heart attack in his sleep when Dabney was thirty-four, Agnes nearly twelve. It was a sad time for us all, although Box was around to help us manage things.

I stayed on at the police department until I had my thirty years and could properly retire. Then I decided to leave Nantucket. It was too lonely a prospect to stay, a woman nearly sixty-five, alone on this island. I had cousins in Virginia, and I liked the idea of moving south, someplace milder.